His Special Holiness, Benedict XVI, is visiting Britain, and scolding them for allowing people not to believe in God. (Like most people, he calls it "atheism", which really only means, "not a theist"--the belief that God is a person--but which, among most people, suggests something nasty and negative.) Not believing in God, he said, was at the root of the Nazi purge of the Jews.
There are a couple of problems with that simple analysis. First, Catholics in Germany are not entirely innocent of the German scorn of Judaism and, second, getting their hands on Jewish money and property might have had something to do with the Holocaust. His Grandeur went on to apologize for the continuing evidence of child sexual abuse and coverup, by Catholic clergy.
I shall not be surprised if someone in Rome does not discover that it is only the priest and bishops and nuns who have sexually abused children are all secret secularists in street-length skirts; that not being religious was their real sin, just as the majority of the population of Germany under the Holocaust only seemed to be almost entirely Catholic and Lutheran.
"It is very easy," someone once told me, "to compare the ideals of your own faith with the actual practice of other people's faith. You always look good when you do that."
The fact is that religious people are neither better nor worse than non-religious people. Secular people are neither more- nor less-moral than religious people. With the exception of psycho- and sociopaths, all of us are distributed along a normal moral curve. Kindness and honesty and cruelty and lying to ourselves about how good we are, and why we are good, is common property.
The important thing is to admit our cruelty when we see it, and to try to change. Blaming it on believing in An Old Man in Heaven, or not believing in That Old Man, is pure nonsense.
There are a couple of problems with that simple analysis. First, Catholics in Germany are not entirely innocent of the German scorn of Judaism and, second, getting their hands on Jewish money and property might have had something to do with the Holocaust. His Grandeur went on to apologize for the continuing evidence of child sexual abuse and coverup, by Catholic clergy.
I shall not be surprised if someone in Rome does not discover that it is only the priest and bishops and nuns who have sexually abused children are all secret secularists in street-length skirts; that not being religious was their real sin, just as the majority of the population of Germany under the Holocaust only seemed to be almost entirely Catholic and Lutheran.
"It is very easy," someone once told me, "to compare the ideals of your own faith with the actual practice of other people's faith. You always look good when you do that."
The fact is that religious people are neither better nor worse than non-religious people. Secular people are neither more- nor less-moral than religious people. With the exception of psycho- and sociopaths, all of us are distributed along a normal moral curve. Kindness and honesty and cruelty and lying to ourselves about how good we are, and why we are good, is common property.
The important thing is to admit our cruelty when we see it, and to try to change. Blaming it on believing in An Old Man in Heaven, or not believing in That Old Man, is pure nonsense.
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